LaVilla: James Weldon Johnson’s Birthplace and Home

by Tim Gilmore, 11/24/2023

“It is raining again,” he writes. It’s “gloomy” and “gray and colorless, and I – oh I,” he says, “am very blue.” It’s the end of March, two months before the Great Fire of 1901, which will ignite just a few blocks north of this small house where Paul Laurence Dunbar is staying with his friend and fellow Black poet James Weldon Johnson.

“It still rains and I am closed up in the house with Jim and his father,” Dunbar writes his wife Alice on April 8^th. “It is thundering so that the very windows rattle but the air is soft and warm.” Each night he eats a salted raw onion and a bowl of okra soup with a bottle of beer, his prescription for battling, however quixotically, his tuberculosis. This newer house in this old Black neighborhood, LaVilla, once its own town and before that a plantation, replaced the older house where Jim was born and grew up.

Johnson, though older by a year, a lawyer and principal of the Stanton Institute — the only school for Black children in his hometown — looks up to the genius of Dunbar, a superstar. Yet something haunts him, lurks between Dunbar’s lines, seems too right and yet not quite.

He’s immersed himself in Dunbar’s verse these last few months, but wonders if even this great Black bard himself can represent Black life in its own voice. Perhaps no one yet has done it. He can’t know now that he must wrestle with the angel of Dunbar’s “dialect verse” in order to ascend his own artistry.

Having written his own poems in Dunbar’s style, and reading Walt Whitman, Johnson feels “a sudden realization,” as he says in his autobiography decades later, “of the artificiality of conventionalized Negro poetry, of its exaggerated geniality, childish optimism, forced comicality, and mawkish sentiment,” of its tendency to express “but two emotions, pathos and humor, thereby making every poem either only sad or only funny.”

Representation of Black American voice, Johnson thinks, goes miscast always in its original white misrepresentation, though Dunbar’s genius brings “a deeper tenderness, a higher polish, a more delicate finish,” through which he “cut away much of what was coarse and,” in Jim’s words, “‘niggerish.’”

Still in these dense LaVilla nights, Jim looks through oblique angles in shadow at the famous poet, while his brother and artistic partner John Rosamond, Rosy, in the music studio he’s made of the front room of the house, touches heart and fingertip to piano keys behind them, and Jim knows “that not even Dunbar” has “been able to break the mold in which dialect poetry had, long before him, been set by representations made of the Negro on the minstrel stage.”

Indeed, “Not even he [has] been able to discard those stereotyped properties of minstrel-stage dialect: the watermelon and the possum. He [does], however, disdain to use that other ancient ‘prop,’ the razor.”

Strange how Paul’s sensitivity and bitterness emerge from the same heart, not even each their own chamber. The sharp sensibilities that first made Paul a poet sentenced him also to haunting by peculiar artistic entrapment: somehow he’d been born to advance his race yet lies shackled in his talents. His soaring powers of empathy paradoxically crash into pits of resentment, and Jim, watching in the crowds in the sunshine, in the soft percussion of rain at night, struggles to reconcile both men in one poet.

Paul writes Alice that he would have written sooner. Though the Johnsons are great friends, he says, “I have taken refuge in my own room,” the only way to write her without others talking over him. “You know my horror of being endlessly entertained and talked to.”

Here Jim and Rosy, two years earlier, collaborate to write “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” the song that becomes known as the Black National Anthem. Jim writes it as a poem. Rosy sets it to music. Now Paul scripts his own Jacksonville experience to new lines, writes a half dozen poems, including “The Colored Band,” or “W’en de Colo’ed Ban’ Comes Ma’chin’ Down de Street,” and Rosy sets also these lines and Paul’s poem “Li’l’ Gal” to music.

But Paul writes bitterly of the Johnsons’ hospitality, calls Jim’s good friend and law partner, J. Douglas Wetmore, “irritating, crass and disgusting.” Not surprising then when Jim says despite the “Dunbar of the courtly manners, polished speech, and modest behavior,” beneath that “polite tongue” resides, like the core of venom in a snake’s mouth, “a sac of bitter sarcasm that he” spits toward people he doesn’t like, “in his own defense.”

Also no surprise that “down here,” Paul says, a month after marching in President William McKinley’s inaugural parade, he finds his “poems recited everywhere. Young men help themselves through school by speaking them, and the schools help their own funds by sending readers out with them to the winter hotels.”

These are the hotels of Jacksonville as “Winter City in Summer Land,” the St. James and the Windsor and a dozen others. They take up whole blocks of the city, hosting hordes of refugees from Northeastern cold, making this strange seasonal Florida town, for a few months each year, a crossroads of arts and culture, tripling and quadrupling in population between December and March. Young European composers wander about town, play the flâneur, while Black waiters sing, performing daily concerts for patrons and passersby.

Yet “very largely,” Paul, 28 years old, reports, “I am out of it. Both my lungs and my throat are bad and, from now on, it seems like merely a fighting race with Death. If this is so, I feel like pulling my horse, and letting the white rider go in without a contest.” Tuberculosis is the wasting disease, consumption, vampirism, bleeding and blanching the body, coughing up blood, losing energy, losing weight.

Still Jim and Paul stay up late at night talking, LaVilla dense against the house from outside, brothels on their block nearby, pool halls and music rooms on theirs, Palestinian and Chinese restauraand ice creameries and clothes cleaners, all the taverns and liquor establishments owned by lighter faces down by the rail terminals and terminal hotels.

Paul knows he won’t live long, his debilitation by tubercular consumption soon compounded by increasing alcohol consumption. If Jim’s thought himself Paul’s “disciple,” one purple raining night, both men smoking cigars, deep in the layers of distant Palestinian music and something that’ll come to be called The Blues and Vaudeville and “coon shouts” and merrymaking and clashing glasses, nevertheless a scrim of cricket song in the soft fingertapping of rain, he becomes the Black Bard’s confessor.

“You know, of course,” Paul says, “that I didn’t start as a dialect poet.” Not at all. He’s made a devil’s bargain. There’s bitter irony at play. Neither young man, that raindrop-percussive purple night, sees the century ahead, that Paul’s work, which millions of readers receive in his name, consists not of lines he’d have laid. “I simply came to the conclusion that I could write it as well, if not better, than anybody else I knew of, and that by doing so I could gain a hearing.”

And so to get readers, Paul says, he wrote in the voice they expected. “I gained the hearing,” he says, “and now they don’t want me to write anything but dialect.” His success has trapped him in the means he used to achieve it. It’s already now, at 28 years old, too late.

Each morning, Paul wakes, coughs and coughs and suppresses his cough, deplores the rain, drenches himself in sunshine. He gives big readings, the first at the St. James Hotel, then at Bethel Baptist Church and Mt. Zion African Methodist Episcopal. His March 21^st reading before an audience of “800 enthusiastic people white and black,” he writes home, is a “great success,” though he’s dreadfully sick, coughing thickly in the wet swamp air of nights-into-mornings, losing weight and depressed.

Still he’ll “be out in the street to-day and stay in the Sunshine,” he says, “all I can. Everyone is so good to me down here and I have fallen in love with the people. I may stay here the full month after all, as I am to give two more readings in this city.”

At Paul’s performances, Rosy starts things off, seated at the piano, plays his “Creole Love Song,” then Ellis Walton and Otto Cantor’s “As the Dawn.”

“As the dawn to waiting skies, / As the dawn to wakeful eyes, / Comest thou to me. / To a flower that breathes at birth / Some sweet fragrance not of earth / Would I liken thee.”

Then Hattie Hopkins, whom The Florida Metropolis newspaper says “was at a disadvantage on account of hoarseness,” sings that poem Paul’s just written that Rosy has set to music, “W’en de Colo’ed Ban’ Comes Ma’chin’ Down de Street.”

And what’s Jim feeling, while watching? – struggling with the Black bard’s dialect verse – hearing, “Oh, de major man’s a-swingin’ of his stick, / An’ de pickaninnies crowdin’ roun’ him thick; / In his go’geous uniform, / He’s de lightnin’ of de sto’m, / An’ de little clouds erroun’ look mighty slick.”

Jim knows the game. He’s accompanied Rosy to New York. They’ve sold operettas and comic operas, had Oscar Hammerstein up to their rooms, partnered with Bob Cole, the Black composer of the minstrel musical A Trip to Coontown, with whom they publish hit songs like “Under the Bamboo Tree.”

Still continues Paul’s poem, “You kin hyeah a fine perfo’mance w’en de white ban’s serenade, / An’ dey play dey high-toned music mighty sweet, / But hit ’s Sousa played in ragtime, an’ hit ’s Rastus on Parade, / Wen de colo’ed ban’ comes ma’chin’ down de street.”

The Metropolis says Paul’s “in excellent voice,” sounds even better than he did last week at Bethel. He reads “The Temptation,” “Signs of the Times” and “When Malindy Sings.” –

“Fiddlin’ man jes’ stop his fiddlin’, / Lay his fiddle on de she’f; / Mockin’-bird quit tryin’ to whistle, / ’Cause he jes’ so shamed hisse’f. / Folks a-playin’ on de banjo / Draps dey fingahs on de strings — / Bless yo’ soul — fu’gits to move ’em, / When Malindy sings.”

His reading of “The Coquette Conquered” elicits “volleys of laughter,” and though he finishes with “The Party,” the poem “Returned” is “the climaxical number of the evening.” The following year Will Marion Cook, Black attorney and composer, sets “Returned” to music. Cook and Dunbar worked together previously on the operetta Clorindy: The Origin of the Cakewalk.

So what does Jim think of the formerly enslaved old man in “Returned,” who sings, “Empty and so silent now the old cabin stands, / No spot on earth so dreary as these bare wide lands, – / Here the pleasures of my youth I spent, / Here thro’ sorrow’s first dim path I went, / Here – tho’ deserted / Will I die content”? Mightn’t Dunbar’s speaker have been, as well, “way down upon de Swanee Ribber” with the “darkies” yet “longin’ for de ole plantation” in Stephen Foster’s 1851 “Old Folks at Home,” later selected Florida’s official state song?

And what does Jim think when he reads in the next day’s Metropolis of “the poet’s recital” and “America’s black man as presented in his dialect and childlike directness of expression” and “native fervency”?

Late other nights, Jim and Paul discuss other poets. Is James Whitcomb Riley, “the Hoosier poet,” closer to any truth in his dialect of Indiana whiteness? And doesn’t whiteness only exist by contrast with Blackness? And it’s not Walt White Man, it’s Whitman, credited with breaking American poetry out of self-conscious English and German high forms to celebrate the voice, any voice, on the American street, a new democratic ideal, a “barbaric yawp,” somehow both ancient and Vedic and burst forth both mystic and populist, declaring open the way for any speaker on the American road, any searcher for truth in the new ancient landscape.

Jim, late in that house enveloped by all the life of LaVilla and Jacksonville outside and up against it, summons the courage, shares with the great Dunbar his own verse, inspired by Whitman, and Paul looks up from Jim’s poems “with a queer smile,” and says, “I don’t like them, and I don’t see what you’re driving at.”

Hurt, not surprised, Jim defends Whitman’s project, reads Paul his favorite lines from Whitman – perhaps:

“The disdain and calmness of martyrs, / The mother condemned for a witch and burnt with dry wood, and her children gazing on; / The hounded slave that flags in the race and leans by the fence, blowing and covered with sweat, / The twinges that sting like needles his legs and neck, / The murderous buckshot and the bullets, / All these I feel or am.”

– against which Dunbar grows yet more defensive. Is Whitman an appropriation, or projection, of voices not otherwise represented?

Paul undergoes initiation here as a Master Mason. Black freemasonry is prestigious, a business and cultural and political brotherhood, dating back to Prince Hall, the formerly enslaved leatherworker who chartered African Lodge no. 459 in Boston in the late 1700s. In Jacksonville, Paul can become a Master Mason for half the price of an application back in D.C. He’ll admit his celebrity keeps the Florida Masons from hazing him too roughly. In fact, they organize a new unit, the Paul Laurence Dunbar Lodge, putting the poet at once through all three degrees. He writes Alice, “My name was a certain protection. They would have killed me in Washington.”

Paul declines, these next five years, precipitously, sinks into his skeleton, coughing up blood and wasting away, haunted by the poet he’d imagined he might be. Nor can Jim foretell his own future careers, lives, selves, literary, journalistic, political. Poet as ambassador. Diplomat as newspaperman. Journalist as poet. Novelist both as reflection and as activism.

A month after Paul leaves town, the Cleaveland Fibre Factory, a building made of pitch pine and stuffed with palmetto leaves, palm fibers, horsehair, feathers and several tons of Spanish moss, catches fire and spreads east from LaVilla, once its own town, once its own plantation, incinerating the Stanton Institute, to decimate, nearly, the entire city of Jacksonville. The city forgets Johnson for a century, but cities last longer than people, and memory knows strange ways of coming ’round.

Meantime, Paul tells Jim, with that white rider on pale horse, the last of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, finally coming down on him, “I’ve kept on doing the same things, and doing them no better. I have never gotten to do the things I really wanted to do.”

cont’d as Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing Park